The legend of Lawrence

‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m not going to be that person, but I still think I could have a hit record. For me a song like “Relative Poverty” is a song for this generation, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t be an anthem for today.’

Lawrence is now 57, and he has been trying (and failing) to become a pop star since 1979. First there was a decade with Felt, the gorgeous wordy group — as if Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground had spent their time in provincial libraries — who made ten albums and ten singles in ten years and then split, and whose newly reissued back catalogue is the reason for our conversation.